Pioneering cancer pathologist Jorge Reis-Filho’s lab at Memorial Sloan Kettering Cancer Center to develop best practices integrating Tapestri single-cell multi-omics capabilities
SOUTH SAN FRANCISCO, March 1, 2022 — Mission Bio, the pioneer in high-throughput single-cell DNA and multi-omics analysis, today announced its first Center of Excellence, located at Memorial Sloan Kettering Cancer Center (MSK) and run by Jorge Reis-Filho, MD, PhD. Dr. Reis-Filho is a breast cancer expert and Director of Experimental Pathology at MSK. His work combines traditional breast cancer pathology approaches with new genomics and artificial intelligence technologies. As the first single-cell Tapestri Center of Excellence for solid tumor research, his lab will drive academic and industrial best practices using single-cell DNA profiling to observe tumor heterogeneity and clonal architecture in solid cancers.
Dr. Reis-Filho’s work has already verified panel content for Mission Bio’s Tapestri platform and highlighted potential uses. Last year, his lab contributed to the single-cell sequencing experiments in a study published in Nature and led by fellow MSK researcher Piro Lito, MD, PhD, whose team demonstrated how Tapestri could uniquely help elucidate mechanisms of cancer resistance. Using Mission Bio’s single-cell DNA sequencing technology, they revealed co-occurrence of secondary driver mutations in cells carrying the KRAS (G12C) mutation, allowing them to circumvent and resist targeted therapy. This represents an important insight into one of the most promising new drugs in solid tumors. Through the Center of Excellence, his team will work closely with Mission Bio’s R&D teams, sharing insights and guidance for improving nuclei extraction protocols, rolling out new virtual panel content for BRCA-mutant cancers and other cancer types, and soon, enhancing copy number variation analysis.
“Exploring new aspects of the biology of solid malignancies, their intra-tumor genetic heterogeneity, and evolutionary trajectories is crucial for furthering this research,” said Dr. Reis-Filho. “Mission Bio has been a great collaborator throughout our research, working with us on sample prep workflows and panel content to expand our understanding of solid tumor dynamics, and we’re looking forward to this next stage of collaborative research.”
Through its centers of excellence, Mission Bio is partnering with leaders within the solid tumor research community as it continues to build and refine Tapestri’s functionality to explore heterogeneity across tumor types. Tapestri is the only commercial product capable of simultaneously analyzing DNA and other analytes like cell surface proteins at the single-cell level through its unique two-step droplet microfluidics technology. Recent high-profile research in breast cancer, non-small cell lung cancer, and colorectal cancer, and melanoma have shown the importance of understanding cancer at a higher resolution. Tapestri can be used to interrogate clonal mosaicism and neoplastic transition, clonal evolution, and metastatic dissemination with its ability to co-detect SNVs and CNVs at the single-cell level in a scalable manner. As a tool for understanding disease resistance, users can detect rare emergent clones early with reliable and sensitive loss of heterozygosity measurements to understand how driver mutations are added over time that allows tumor escape and metastasis. And single-cell multi-omic analysis has growing importance in precision cancer medicine, clarifying the clonal structure of tumors to guide combination therapeutic development and personalized treatment.
“We’re thrilled to welcome Dr. Reis-Filho’s lab as we inaugurate our solid tumor Centers of Excellence,” said Yan Zhang, PhD, CEO of Mission Bio. “Single-cell analysis is helping us challenge cancer resistance, opening new avenues for both academic research and improving clinical outcomes. We look forward to expanding this collaboration and building more like it with additional experts as we shine a new light across the solid tumor landscape.”
To learn more, visit missionbio.com.
About Mission Bio
Mission Bio is a life sciences company that accelerates discoveries and cures for a wide range of diseases by equipping researchers with the tools they need to better measure and predict our resistance and response to new therapies. Mission Bio’s multi-omics approach improves time-to-market for new therapeutics, including innovative cell and gene therapies that provide new pathways to health. Founded in 2014, Mission Bio has secured investment from Novo Growth, Cota Capital, Agilent Technologies, Mayfield Fund, and others.
The company’s Tapestri platform gives researchers around the globe the power to interrogate every molecule in a cell together, providing a comprehensive understanding of activity from a single sample. Tapestri is the only commercialized multi-omics platform capable of analyzing DNA and protein simultaneously from the same sample at single-cell resolution. The Tapestri Platform is being utilized by customers at leading research centers, pharmaceutical, and diagnostics companies worldwide to develop treatments and eventually cures for cancer.
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